


Black and White

by romanoir



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Canon character deaths, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:59:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanoir/pseuds/romanoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Klaus collects the love letters of those he has killed, Stefan writes the names of his victims on a wall, Elijah stalks the obituaries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black and White

The black and white lines screamed back at him, a stark comparison that never ceased to amaze him. The obituaries called out to him, louder and louder as those faceless names slept, longer and longer, frozen in silence. Sometimes he recognized a name - a witch; a werewolf - another lost soul hidden away in the middle of the cold, dark ocean. Most days, they were strangers, humans he never knew, had never heard of. They were a deathly chorus of short, black names. This is all you will be, all you are. A name. A goodbye. Just black ink.

He would wonder about their lives; had they been happy? Sad? ‘A Loving Father’, or just the blurred image constructed from a twenty-five-word limit? Just a mere dollar to have the whole world mourn.

Were they happy when they died? Or was it welcomed, a final release from this emptiness, this loneliness, this guilt?

_Elena Gilbert. Loving, compassionate, his equal. Taken too young. She will be dearly missed. - The hardest dollar he ever spent._

_Was she happy when she died? Or did it come in a dazzling flash of red, of fury, of darkness?_

_Could she even feel the end?_

—

His first obituary was a tear-stained reminder, kept in his suit pocket next to spare change, to keys, to chaos in the dark. Later, in Italy, or France, the short goodbye became a promise of forever, inked in black on to the white skin covering his heart – black and white black and white black and white. It had come quickly - caught only by the thick outline of black spread out across the page – noticed in the wisdom of age. Rebekah Mikaelson, lived and died as she chose fit - as a mortal, a human - a choice that had haunted him since her death eighty years before. She was 25.

Then dates

– no emotion, no farewell, just cold, just harsh, just black.

—

In amongst the chaos of war he would stalk names across pages, people he had fought, people he had killed – no, not people - werewolves; vampires; hybrids. It was always us and them; the other - always good and bad, black and white. If he would catch their name against the sea of goodbyes, he would smirk, fold the paper and carry on, but with every friend he found amongst the chaos he would be left crippled, lost. Black and white. The hypocrisy was lost on him, but most things were those days. All he knew was black and white.

—

Towards the end he reads the pages like a bible. There lies the story of everyone he has ever known, ever loved, laid out in black and white but decaying fast. Laced in blood are the names of a thousand casualties, strewn out, remembered by a name, a date, a time, a place – war, war, war. He can trace his finger over the ones he killed – they line his apartment, a reminder of how he arrived here. He was not innocent – his hands were laced, stained black and white – a reminder of years spent filling pages with black, black, black.

—

He has spent the last hundred years wandering the pages, stalking the obituaries with a passion that left him dead inside. He has read four generations worth of history, captioned off in twenty-five word snippets of goodbye, because he is sorry – so, sorry, and he doesn’t want to miss a death again. He tells himself their stories, like he knows them, but everyone he knows is long gone, old news, black and white. Mostly though he wonders, when the end comes what will his twenty-five words be.

—

He never did have twenty-five words. When Elijah Smith died he was thrown in an unmarked grave, cold and alone.


End file.
